Hello, everybody!
I’ve been studying japanese on Wanikani for some time now and really liked it
But as you surely know some Kanjis or vocabulary are tricky to remember even with the given mnemonics
So, by now I’ve come to make my own association for remembering those more easily and I know I’m not the only one to do that.
And of course you guess it, what I’m asking for is: what are your personals mnemomics or techniques for learning

Personal mnemonics are just that they are personal and have a degree of difficulty for another to relate and use to recall kanji, due to the fact that everyones own experience and knowledge only relates to them personally. If someone has no knowledge or experience with what is said in a mnemonics then they have to now learn the mnemonic as well as the kanji, this seems excessive and tiresome in the learning process, just stick to your own mnemonics as the relation to your knowledge and experience makes it eazier for you to recall things.

I personally avoid wanaikani mnemonics as there are a lot of irrelevant ones and many that are a distant stretch to relate to the kanji, they are also lengthy and far too wordy.

Learn the radicals and create your own story. Also, some radicals need to have their name changed to be more inline with the kanji, some radical names dont even associate with a base kanji at all. Wanakani also has a bad habit of teaching a radical long after you have been taught the base kanji that is the same as the radical, so the radicals become useless to learn after the kanji itself. The radicals should be taught before the base kanji, as the creators of wanikani are not professional teachers they don’t understand the imnportance of ordinal learning.

I was just curious about what everyone’s method to learn the kanji on wanikani :slight_smile
By the way I’m using the mnemonics on wanikani but with a little bit of reconditionning, this way my brain can handle intense memorization x)

I use a lot of them, especially for readings. I am quite lucky because I am italian, and I am not referring to our food Italian and Japanese are the two closest languages by sound, therefore it happens that sometimes Japanese words have some sense in Italian, for example かさ (umbrella) is the same sound of “casa” (house) in Italian. I use those similarities for remembering some readings.

I’m lucky in that a lot of the Zen teachers and Zen terms I know either have bits of kanji in them, or have common kanji sounds (obviously).

Some examples:

言 - げん - Why say anything else besides Gen-jo Koan, the best summation of Zen teachings? (This is a really important Zen text that is often chanted and studied aloud.

Of course, Genjo-Koan is all about you! 言う(いう)!

Some are straight transfers - 心 is everywhere in Zen.

Also knowing some Spanish and being fluent in french, I also draw on some of those to help.

Like what do we eat in Spanish food like Paella? 米!

My last technique is looking out for words I’m learning in anime and other Japanese media. I’ve got 走るdown now because I hear it constantly in the new and highly recommended anime, “Run with the wind”.

About anime I do the same! I even used monster hunter for rememnbering 走る since I use the japanese voice with english subtitles x) And hopefully before going on Wanikani I had some knowledge of kanji and vocab and I think otherwise It would have been much harder to progress :).
I guess it’s all about what make your mind tilt the good way

I use them frequently as rhyming or tying it to something real helps me out a lot. I generally add them to the Notes section of WaniKani. Pardon the Romanji, I am at work on my break so I don’t have Japanese font enabled. A few of them I have are:

For custom mnemomics, I try to let my subconscious pick it. Given the info in front of me (radical/reading/definition), something personal or strange will emerge if I clear my mind for a little bit. Of course some are harder than others or the WK mnemonic is just fine too. Whatever it is, I want a concise and mentally ergonomic method. I don’t want some Harry Potter saga for every mnemonic that I can’t identify with.